Framing and educating attention. A sensory apprenticeship in the context of domestic energy research

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore the notion of sensory apprenticeship in processes of experiential and anthropological knowledge production in the applied context of a British study on domestic energy consumption. In Making, the anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that what we call research or fieldwork in anthropology »is in truth a protracted masterclass in which the novice gradually learns to see things, and to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do« (Ingold 2013: 2). Borrowing from the ecological psychologist, James Gibson, Ingold likens this to undergoing an »education of attention« (Gibson 1979: 254; Grasseni 2004). In this sense, anthropologists are always students, or apprentices, to the practical, experiential and discursive lifeworlds of their respondents, continually transforming (Ingold 2013) as they move forward with them through the environments of which they are part. This is perhaps most pertinent in sensory-ethnographic research where, as Pink has noted, »[l]earning to sense and make meanings as others do [ ... ] involves us not simply observing what they do, but learning how to use all our senses and to participate in _their worlds, on the terms of their embodied understanding« (Pink 2009: 72).